Double Exposure Therapy

The first step would be enough to intimate the weak of heart – about three feet high – I had to practically mount the first step of the eleven mile Kalalau trail. I had never done anything like it in my life, so I plead innocence on what propelled me to think I could handle this kind of adventure. I had a fifty pound backpack filled with the things I thought might need to sleep outdoors, without shelter, laid bare to the elements. I had good hiking shoes, laces double knotted with my will and my full-hardiness. It was Hawaii after all; Kauai, the garden isle, prompting one to feel that Adam and his infamous counterpart, Eve, might come strolling past on the narrow trails through the jungle. I was hiking along the Na'Pali Coast on the north coast of the island, one of the most remote places on earth. I had heard that there were only two ways to get there, by foot or by helicopter, and the latter was reserved for emergency situations, a desperate solution. For this reason, the Na’Pali coast attracted those on the fringe and the free-spirited….I wasn’t sure I fit into either category.

The hike consisted of the most beautiful and frightening scenic vistas - flora, bigger than cars, full, circular, concentric, double rainbows viewed from harrowing cliff faces, expansive views, dense, dank jungle. Earth, rock, and all breathing things in between, turns, uphills, downhills, sheer cliff faces with narrow paths measured in mere inches. Each turn was an illustration of the extreme, sun, rain, waterfalls, wetness leaking and oozing, howling winds and balmy, sweaty interiors, wildness and abundance that I never known.

I started out at the break of dawn and much to my surprise, I was in the Kalalau valley by late afternoon. Did I mention that I was on a spiritual sojourn? So on top of the arduous adventure of my life, I was not eating food. I was hungry and clueless to the pitfalls that might await. Ignorance is bliss...well, in this case, ignorance made it possible.

There was something I was very aware of tho; it was my relationship to water, especially the ocean. From the youngest age, I had a deep trepidation of the sea. There’s a black and white photo of my father carrying me towards the water on a sunny day at a beach. I see that I’m screaming - not with delight at the marvel of the ocean, but with sheer fear. On occasional summer days spent by a pool, I would enviously look at my friends and family, all willy-nilly jumping into the water without a care in the world. Me, I was glued to the edge of the pool, like a lone cheerio propelled by mass, gravity, some sort of physics to the edge where I couldn’t or wouldn’t let go. It wasn’t until college when my roommate taught me the breaststroke that I actually swam a lap in a pool. I had panic attacks during that first attempt, almost overwhelmed by liquid mass.

By my early 30’s and I had a few experiences with swimming. I even managed to pass a PADI scuba diving certification - although I don’t know how. Still I was never good at actually relaxing my body in any body of water. In my small mind, I would try to contemplate the vastness of the ocean, which would overwhelm me with a sense of emptiness - lost, lonely and wholly unsafe. The Pacific Ocean, seemed to me, the most formidable of all.

Back on the trail, I figured that the reason that boats wouldn't go to the Na’Pali Coast was because the seas were too rough. In fact, you don’t really hear about port towns of Hawaii in general, with the exception of the infamous Pearl Harbor, because the ocean is so unpredictable and the newly churned lava land, unwelcoming. Can you imagine those early Polynesians traveling from one speck of an island to another speck of an island in the stormy Pacific? I already feel like I'm drowning. However, as I got closer to my destination, I met a traveller or two, who knew the Coast and reported that the water was calmer than they had ever seen it. And to be sure, the vista of the beach at the end of the hike was surreal. The beach was extremely wide, empty; the water titillating, dazzling and calm. There was barely a break, and the vast ocean was looking deceivingly lake-like. It was a phenomenon. Oh. More whispers from the ones in the know, some people came to the coast to be wild, free, and unclothed. There was an opportunity to test drive that primitive way of being. I hadn’t really thought about it, but nudists in the Na’Pali valley made sense, being in the most remote part one of the most remote islands in the world. But, I liked my clothes, and I had put some thought and effort into my outfit, including my favorite knee-length boy scout navy socks with the three-inch wide, bright, yellow rib.

I don’t even remember how I found sleep that night–must have found some spot under some trees, set up my backpack, laid down and knocked my tired and hungry ass out. The next day, I was enticed to check out the adjacent beach with a fellow traveller, the caveat being that the only way to get there was by swimming. It’s strange when you come up to something that has been haunting you for your entire life and you get this magical opportunity to confront it. It was not going to be anything like swimming at 9pm in the fluorescent-lit safety of the University pool. But what can I say, I was so broken, or was that, so open, so far from home, so alone, so empty (I mean hungry) I was nothing, really. Maybe that’s why I felt courageous enough to swim a quarter of a mile to this other beach, without any anchor to tether me to the land. In fact, I didn’t have any clothes on either because au natural seemed like the only way to go. So what if I perished, overcome by the ocean in the way that I must have always dreaded? Maybe that’s why I felt the recourse to relinquish all my clothes. If I died, it might as well be in the skin I was born in.

To say I swam for dear life is no exaggeration. The water was calm but it also had its force, and my mind and heart were in danger of sinking from the sheer risk of it all. When I saw the shoreline of the next beach, I felt the exhilaration of accomplishment. As I gratefully grabbed for some indication of land on my last few strokes, I was scared yet beaming and looking forward to kissing the golden sand when I landed. I was flung onto shore by a gentle break, bare ass in the air, my tears of joy and exhaustion no different than the salt water. Surprisingly, I got a quick feeling of something odd that landed on me, like a gasping fish, flailing as it jumps out the water - an energetic jolt, somewhat gentle yet forceful. When I pivoted my eyes towards the ocean, I saw a boat offshore, chock-full of tourists, a few hundred yards from where I stood in my revelation.

In my shock and embarrassment, I didn't have a clue on what to do next. Full exposure! Dang, not even a coconut shell to hide behind! That's when a calm and clear thought rang in my mind and usurped any sense of shame. Behind me were the most majestic cliffs I’d ever seen. Red rich earth reaching in consort with the heavens. A sacred space where Hawaiian royalty conducted ritual and ceremony. No matter how stunning, how awe-inspiring, how grand and magnanimous, I understood that most people on the boat would remember this moment as the time they saw that “naked girl on the beach.” I recognized my own insignificance in comparison to the land that birthed me. I realized how much suffering we endure by the shame we carry as our bodies. We, in fact cannot present ourselves, as we were created, in our own glory without some association to something sexual or some state of madness. All the dogmas that were floating in the ocean in my mind, instantly dissolved into the vastness of the ocean that had just a moment ago held me.

Maybe it has to do with that old story, Adam and Eve, who made a grave mistake with no opportunity for redemption, just nakedness and shame. We can’t even reconcile it ourselves, the freedom of being empty - so fully programmed are we to constantly hide our bodies thus obscuring our primal longings from ourselves.

I happily recount this moment of reconciling my fear of water AND my fear of my nakedness as a transformative event in my life. A double whammy like those double rainbows I had foreseen while looking over the precipice. And like any good story, therein lies the foreshadowing spelled out in magic and miracles. When I told my therapist friend this tale, she told me that there’s a term in counseling which pretty much sums this episode up….exposure therapy! HA! Call it what you will, the benefits of experience still reverberate in my life. It wasn’t that my life was now free of all other challenges, but overcoming, in a single act, a fear that I had and a fear I didn’t know I had, was the exposure I needed to live untethered to the rules that kept me from swimming freely.